More TEM THEMIS Weirdness

Written By: The Electric Warrior

(The Electric Warrior) - A week prior to his latest
claims about the Face on Mars, Richard Hoagland
sparked a controversy about a series of Mars Odyssey
spacecraft images by claiming that online versions of
the THEMIS data from NASA were a fraud.

The Arizona State University THEMIS team captured
an infrared image of the Mars Cydonia region,
including the notorious Face on Mars, which has been
freely available since July 24.

Hoagland now asserts that a special version of the
THEMIS data, allegedly acquired from the NASA/ASU
Web site under mysterious circumstances, shows
incontrovertible evidence of a city on Mars. Hoagland
made a copy of his special image available for
download from The Enterprise Mission (TEM), calling
his version the "real" data.

In a message relayed to a Space.com online forum
on the topic of Cydonia, Hoagland said he invited
side-by-side comparison and assessments regarding
the intrinsic quality of the "real" image.

DARK GRAY SHADOW

A dark gray shadow runs across the series of THEMIS
images in the version of the file that The
Enterprise Mission calls the "real" data. The shadow
is seen in this crop from the left-most (6.62 um)
image. The shadow may be an image processing
artifact.

"If you look at the image that is being purported
and discussed," ASU’s Philip Christensen told MSNBC,
"it’s clearly been doctored."

FLUSH ACROSS THE TOP

The file from NASA/ASU does not have the dark gray
shadow across the top. The individual image strips
are placed on a plain black background. In the TEM
version, the gray shadow shows up across the back-
ground, an indication that the entire image, not
individual strips, were processed.

(MSNBC) - The most prominent boosters of Martian
enigmas such as the "Face on Mars" have produced
photos that they say provide evidence of mysterious
buried city-style structures on the Red Planet -
but the origins of the photos turn out to be just
as murky a mystery.